1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for feeding used objects, in particular used beverage containers (in the following referred to as “UBCs”), to a recording and/or sorting unit, wherein the objects are supplied on receiving means and forwarded one by one with a predetermined orientation on a feeding conveyor.
2. Description of Related Art
Breweries, bottlers and manufacturers of mineral water, soft drinks and the like frequently use non refillable bottles made of plastic, glass or metal cans that are part of a deposit/return system, e.g. the PET-cide system in Germany (PET is short for polyethylene terephthalate and PET is a thermoplastic polymer resin of the polyester family). Each UBC represents a deposit fee that has an effect on manufacturers, distributors and consumers motivating the consumers to return the UBCs in the shops, where the returned UBCs either are counted and registered in RVM's (Reverse Vending Machines), or manually accepted by the cashier whereby the consumer gets the deposit fee back. In either case the UBCs are transported to central counting centers, where the UBCs are counted and registered once again and sorted into the different material fractions e.g. PET, glass, aluminum and steel.
Based upon the counting and registration at the counting centre the manufacturers and/or distributors are invoiced for the deposit fee, which amount is collected by the shops. After counting and registration the UBCs are devaluated in e.g. compactors, shredders etc. and the residual products are sent to recycling. Used beverage containers may also be referred to as “empties”.
A system for processing of packages, such as recyclable UBCs, is known from WO 2006/125436 A1. In this system, UBCs are recorded, counted and sorted in a counting and sorting machine. Large numbers of UBCs can be handled per time unit. Due to the high capacity of this system, it may be referred to as a high speed counting and sorting machine. In this system the UBCs are supplied in a receiving container and picked up and advanced on conveyors by means of carriers on said conveyors, said carriers thereby applying a force to the packages. The packages are subsequently fed singly to a recording unit at a high speed. Some of the returned UBCs are possibly glass bottles, and if the share of glass bottles in the returned packages is too large, the feeding unit is unable to provide a sufficient number of packages to the recording unit to utilize the maximum capacity of this known system due to the fragility of the glass bottles.
A feeding system for bottles is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,489,820. In this system, upright bottles are transferred from laterally adjacent rows on a feed conveyor into a single row of bottles on a downstream conveyor. The bottles align in a single row due to passing a number of conveyors with increasing speed. No external forces are applied to the bottles; they move across the conveyors solely due to gravity. However, the system applies to upright bottles identical in shape and would be unsuitable for e.g. bottles of different shapes in a horizontal position.
For feeding bottles or cans to the recording unit in a reverse vending system, the bottles must be fed singly and orientated correctly. If the high capacity system described in International Patent Application Publication WO 2006/125436 A 1 and corresponding U.S. Patent Application Publication 2008/0277323 is not suitable for this, the alternative is to arrange that UBCs are supplied to a receiving table and orientated manually and placed on a conveyor. This is not considered a cost-effective solution just as this solution is limited in capacity both in the amount of recyclable UBCs which can be handled at the time and the speed at which the UBCs can be processed. Moreover, a manual solution for feeding the UBCs to the recording and sorting units involves a labor intensive and monotone working operation.